Women’s Heart Center

• Chest pain with normal coronary arteries / Coronary microvascular dysfunction / Microvascular angina / Cardiac syndrome X
• Vasospastic angina
• Spontaneous coronary artery dissection
• Pregnancy and heart disease
• Broken heart syndrome / Takotsubo cardiomyopathy / Stress induced cardiomyopathy
• Diastolic heart failure / Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
• Venous thromboembolism / Pulmonary embolism / Deep venous thrombosis
• Fibromuscular dysplasia

• Family history of heart disease
• High cholesterol
• High blood pressure
• Risk biomarkers such as lipoprotein (a) [Lp(a)]
• Adverse pregnancy outcomes such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, small for gestational age, placental abruption, pregnancy loss, intrauterine growth retardation or preterm delivery
• Rheumatologic disease
• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)
• Premature menopause
• Hormone therapy
• History of cancer treatments

Each new patient completes a risk assessment questionnaire and clinical assessment. When indicated, additional testing may be performed.

Risk factors that affect both sexes are considered as well as those specific to women such as premature menopause, hormone therapy and pregnancy-related conditions.

Women are enrolled within six months after delivery with adverse pregnancy outcomes such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, small for gestational age, placental abruption, pregnancy loss, intrauterine growth retardation or preterm delivery for long term follow-up in collaboration with Winchester Hospital obstetricians and maternal-fetal medicine specialists.

The Center provides care for women with or at high risk for heart disease who have menopausal symptoms or are considering the use of hormonal contraceptives or treatments.

The Center can identify and treat women who may have heart disease or be at increased risk of heart disease due to treatment with radiation and chemotherapy.

The Center offers lifestyle modification programs aimed at reducing cardiovascular risk in women. Programs include an Exercise/Rehabilitation program, Nutritional Counselling, Behavioral Health Services and Smoking Cessation.

For over 30 years, cardiovascular disease has been recognized to affect men and women differently. These differences exist in disease biology, disease presentation and treatment responses. Certain cardiovascular conditions affect women predominantly. About 80-90% of these patients are women. Unfortunately, there is minimal to no scientific understanding of the biologic basis for these conditions. How do these diseases develop? Why do they affect women more than men? What is the best treatment for them? All these questions remain to be answered. Most importantly, these questions must be answered to improve symptom burden and decrease mortality for patients with cardiovascular disease.

To advance our understanding of female biased cardiovascular diseases and deliver world class care for women with cardiovascular disease, we established the Women’s Heart Center at Lahey Hospital in 2021. In our Center, we designed a multi-institutional collaborative research program. We are creating a next-generation, prospective Lahey cohort of women biased cardiovascular conditions to advance the field. A cohort where we genotype, perform transcriptomics and biobank samples to understand the origins of sex differences in cardiovascular disease. The goal of the cohort is to understand the genesis of sex differences in cardiovascular disease by diving deep into the details of a patient’s biology and environment. Understanding the associations of biology and the environment with cardiovascular disease at this granular level will be transformative and lead to new diagnostic and treatment approaches.

Women who experience domestic abuse may be more likely to develop heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. Despite the high cardiovascular disease risk for survivors and a recognized need for education, screening and prevention efforts, there are no cardiovascular health resources currently available to survivors of domestic violence. The Lahey Women’s Heart Center in partnership with Saheli, a Burlington based nonprofit community organization for domestic violence survivors, designed this program for raising awareness about women’s heart health, for cardiovascular screening among the women survivors of domestic violence and for establishing clinical care for those survivors with positive screening by engaging Tufts University School of Medicine students and faculty in a community driven effort.